Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel (review)

Over the past quarter-century and more, Cary Nederman, one of the few specialists in medieval political thinking to find an enduring home in a political science department, has contributed to his chosen field a steady stream of articles, book chapters, and monographs addressing an unusually broad array of topics ranging from John of Salisbury to Jean Gerson, from Marsiglio of Padua to Hegel, and from Henry de Bracton to Machiavelli. Though his impressive work in twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century political thought is not represented here, his other shorter pieces, revised in differential degree, are gathered together here in the twenty chapters of this useful and instructive book, and he is to be congratulated on having made this substantial body of work more readily available to his fellow scholars. The pieces in question he clusters loosely into five groups: “Historiographies of the Early European Tradition, Continuity and Change”; “Dissenting Voices and the Limits of Power”; “Republican Self-Governance and Universal Empires”; “The Virtues of Necessity: Economic Principles of Politics”; and “Modern Receptions of Medieval Ideas.” These headings themselves attest to the challengingly disparate nature of these essays. There is in fact no obvious center of gravity to this whole body of work, and, within the compass of a short review, it is accordingly difficult to do justice to it. Most instructive is what he has to say on political representation, on Marsiglio of Padua, and on the continuing relevance of the much-criticized work of Walter Ullmann and the comparatively overlooked work of A. P. d’Entrèves. Least instructive, on the other hand, are his comments (versus A. J. Black) on republicanism and the tiresome polemic he directs against those historians whom he lumps together as “neo-Figgisites”—though here, I must identify myself as one of those so lumped.

The disparate nature of the pieces gathered together here appears also to have confronted the author himself with (self-confessed) difficulties when he set out to conceptualize the overall contents of the book with clarity and in appropriately synthetic fashion (p. xi). In the event, the introduction does little to integrate the book’s five parts into any even quasi-unified enterprise; what it does do, rather, is to serve as an introduction to part I and as yet another vehicle forwarding his very single-minded enterprise of criticizing those historians (and inevitably his “neo-Figgisites”) whom he portrays as having ignored or underestimated what others have called “this unsurmountable divide”between “medieval and modern” (p. xix). Scholarly disagreement, it is true, is often the engine that serves to move historians toward deeper historical understanding. But one cannot help being puzzled here by the species of aggrieved condescension that informs the tone of Nederman’s critique of Brian Tierney’s oeuvre and, though in lesser degree, the efforts of those Nederman fingers as historiographic fellow travelers. By dint of selective, inexact, and sometimes reductive readings, historians of subtlety and nuance like Tierney himself or Constantin Fasolt are shoe-horned into competing “schools” preoccupied, respectively, with “continuity” or with “rupture”—a tactic akin to Pope Benedict XVI’s comparably tendentious portrayal of commentators on the Second Vatican Council. Nor can we overlook the essentialist way in which he deploys the terms medieval and modern. Nor, again, though it is no more than a Renaissance humanist contrivance, his lack of any qualms about simply taking for granted the very periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern. And yet at the heart of the disagreement to which he devotes so much attention is the growing realization among historians that that particular schema has become as much a hindrance as a help when it comes to understanding the course of European intellectual history. Firmly institutionalized though it still is, it has...